'PinOut!' Review - A Pretty, Good Spin on Pinball

'PinOut!' Review - A Pretty, Good Spin on Pinball

With the end of the year upon us, I'm doing my usual job of going back and picking out some games for review that for whatever reason didn't get one upon release. This year, most of the choices are coming from suggestions from the community, and one of the first games mentioned was PinOut! [Free]. Given that pinball is usually like catnip for me, I'm not sure why I missed this one to begin with. I imagine I was knee-deep in RPGs or something like that. At any rate, it's better late than never, so let's take a look at this stylish spin on one of the oldest electronic gaming genres.
The goal of PinOut! is simple: you need to help your ball escape the board. You only have the usual means of interacting with the ball, however, and just as in normal pinball, the virtual board is angled such that what goes up will surely come down if nothing gets in its way. Using the flippers placed along the route, you need to carefully launch the ball through a series of mini-tables. Unlike real pinball, if you miss the ball, you don't lose a life or anything like that. The ball simply rolls back down the board, setting back your hard-won progress, until you catch it with another set of flippers. As you progress through the mini-tables, accuracy becomes more and more important. The last two tables in particular will prove to be futile unless you've learned how to aim or are incredibly lucky.
Still, if that was all there was to the game, most people would be able to conquer it eventually through little more than sheer tenacity. There's one more wrinkle to the game that ups the challenge a fair bit, though. Namely, you're running on a timer. When the clock hits zero, you're finished. Because of this, watching the ball slip between your flippers isn't just an annoyance that you'll need to recover from. Missing a shot a few times isn't merely a bit of practice for the inevitable victory. No, every missed ball, every poorly-placed shot, every swing around a roundabout that doesn't get the ball where you need it to go, puts your run in jeopardy. You can afford to waste some time and still reach the end, mind you. But that buffer is likely to get smaller the farther in you go.
You can replenish some of your lost time in a couple of different ways. There are mini-games along the way that will award you with additional time based on your performance, providing a nice little boost while also giving you something to do other than batting a ball around. The most common way to recover time, however, is by scooping up the little dots scattered along the board. You can't miss some of them, since the paths leading from one area to the next are packed with these dots. The majority of them require you to take one particular route from mini-table to mini-table, though, making an already strict series of shots into something even more fussy. Aside from boosts to your timer, you'll also be able to collect a few different power-ups that will assist you greatly. These power-ups do thing...

News most viewed Today

We all knew it was coming and now Nintendo has officially announced it; coming later this year, the SNES Classic Edition will be headed to retail shelves on September 29th. The mini system, which contains 21 pre-installed classic games and can... -

Monolith and Warner Bros. had a big day at San Diego Comic-Con as they were showing off their heavily anticipated action game Middle-earth: Shadow of War. The Shadow of Mordor sequel received a new trailer starring the villainous Shelob. There was... -

Picture the GameSpy shutdown like a massive power-cut rolling out over an entire continent, plunging a significant portion of gaming’s multiplayer catalogue into darkness. The hope is that some publishers have a backup generator, and will... -

RedLynx Studio has announced that Trials Fusion players will be able to share custom tracks across PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox 360, and PC. Over on the gameâ€™s forums, the developer said that Track Central is cross-platform with immediate... -

A whole lot of indies and games that are finally getting their PS4 release came out in April, but so did NetherRealmâ€™s bloody fighter. Which of the games that released in April are must plays, and which one achieved our April 2015 Game of the... -

Along with the Switch presentation on January 12th and the Nintendo Switch Experience over the following days, Nintendo has announced that a Nintendo Game Music Live concert will be taking place in Tokyo on January 14th and 15th. Both a big band and... -

With update 1.86 now live for PlayStation Home, thirteen Trophies have been added: 1 Gold, 3 Silver, and 9 Bronze, but unfortunately no Platinum.
Here’s the full list of Trophies:
Gold
There’s No Place Like Home – Visit... -

HTML5 is a standard for displaying multimedia content on the web, and web companies are increasingly adopting it. Last month, YouTube opted for HTML5 as the default video format instead of Flash. According to an infographic from Template.net, HTML5... -